Schluss For Germany's Oldest Online Service

Rolo Tomasi writes: "Germany's first online service, BTX (Bildschirmtext) is shutting down. BTX had a history of major security flaws, which made the Chaos Computer Club famous." Non-speakers might want to try a translation.

Comments

Still In Use

[bamberg29]

Germans still used this up to now for the so called 'Classic' applications such as home banking. T-Online (large German ISP) was the one that kept this system up until now mostly for the homebanking applications, but they have now migrated it to regular TCP/IP protocols.

So now they can finally get rid of it.

Another one gone, another one gone...

[SurrealKnife]

Another one bites the dust.

Seriously: is it necessary to hear when every new tech company that either a) had a bad business model or b) couldn't adjust to a change in markets, dies? It's just business!

No, this isn't a troll - I really do feel it's getting a bit OTT. Businesses die and start up the whole time, very few last that long, especially in a new and fast-changing market. It's often in fact more efficient to close one business and open a new one (rather than majorly change a business model) to respond to a large change in market conditions.

If there was something pertinent hidden deep in the text, my apologies - my german is by no means fantastic these days and I don't trust babelfish that well!

Micropayment

[Lars T.]

BTX allowed micropayment, in a way that a page you loaded could cost money, from between DM 0.01 to 9.99 (the system would ask you before you loaded it of course).

When the CCC found an exploit in the system, they informed (the then still state owned monopolistic mail/phone company) Deutsche Bundespost. The DBP said there was nothing wrong, so the CCC used the exploit to get the computer from a bank to call up their page again and again, untill the bank owed the more than DM 10,000. They gave it back the next day, and BTX got a very bad press.

Re:Slow day?

[Anonymous Coward]

from telepolis [www.heise.de/telepolis]

The Chaos Computer Club ( CCC) is putting on an interactive light show on Alexanderplatz in Berlin and it is just too cool. It's called blinkenlights and here's how it works: A Plattenbau-style building called the Haus des Lehrers, the former GDR ministry of education, is empty at the moment, so on one side of it, the CCC has installed 144 spotlights (the sort used to light up construction sites at night) behind each window on the top eight floors. If you've already done the math, you know that each floor is 18 windows wide. A computer regulates the on-off switch on each spotlight, so what you end up with is what the CCC calls "a sort of monochrome matrix with 8X18 pixels."

Now comes the cool part. Anyone can download an authoring tool called Blinkenpaint (hundreds already have) or write a simple animation program by hand (an example of a beating heart is shown on the CCC "blinkenlights" page) and send it in. The best ones blink for all the world to see. Yes, all the world, because the CCC has set up webcams (though they seem to be behind by a few days; this one is unfortunately a bit farther away from the building, but it is live).

But here's the really cool part. You can play Pong with this thing. You call the number given on the CCC "blinkenlights" page (at 2.42 marks a minute, it's not cheap but it does count as a donation) and move your paddle with the numbers 5 and 8 and play against the computer or a second caller.

minitel still works !

[dario_moreno]

the equivalent in France, Minitel, still works,
although for the first time it is reported
that online purchases on the Web overtook
those on Minitel this Xmas. (talking 10^9 $ here).

Talk about a business model : reliable content
due to synchronous, non packet data transmission,
billed on the minute with a large number of
phony pRon sites. I think that in 20 years
more than 10 billion $ net profit were taken
by France Telecom and all the content providers.
about 10 million terminals were given for free
to telephone line suscribers ; I think
that it was the initial leverage that BTX
neglected to apply.

The system still rocks to find a phone #,
book train tickets or check a bank account balance : the system boots in less than 10 s and
connects to the site in about the same duration.

The bandwidth admittely sucks, as well as the
graphics (about the same half graphics characters as IBM 850), but to get something done quickly
and reliably, it still is unbeatable.